Two Sisters (On the Terrace)

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On View

Date:

1881

Artist:

Pierre-Auguste RenoirFrench, 1841-1919

About this artwork

“He loves everything that is joyous, brilliant, and consoling in life,” an anonymous interviewer once wrote about Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This may explain why Two Sisters (On the Terrace) is one of the most popular paintings in the Art Institute. Here Renoir depicted the radiance of lovely young women on a warm and beautiful day. The older girl, wearing the female boater’s blue ﬂannel, is posed in the center of the evocative landscape backdrop of Chatou, a suburban town where the artist spent much of the spring of 1881. She gazes absently beyond her younger companion, who seems, in a charming visual conceit, to have just dashed into the picture. Technically, the painting is a tour de force: Renoir juxtaposed solid, almost life-size figures against a landscape that—like a stage set—seems a realm of pure vision and fantasy. The sewing basket in the left foreground evokes a palette, holding the bright, pure pigments that the artist mixed, diluted, and altered to create the rest of the painting. Although the girls were not actually sisters, Renoir’s dealer showed the work with this title, along with Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando and others, at the seventh Impressionist exhibition, in 1882.

Ministry of Culture; State Hermitage Museum; Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Art Institute of Chicago, Ot Delakrua do Matissa: Shedevry frantsuzskoi zhivopisi XIX–nachala XX veka, iz Muzeia Metropoliten v N’iu-Iorke i Khudozhestvennogo Instituta v Chikago [From Delacroix to Matisse: Masterpieces of French painting of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago], trans. from English by Iu. A. Kleiner and A. A. Zhukov, exh. cat. (Avrora, 1988), p. 64.

Art Institute of Chicago, Treasures of 19th- and 20th-Century Painting: The Art Institute of Chicago, with an introduction by James N. Wood (Art Institute of Chicago/Abbeville, 1993), p. 87 (ill.).

Art Institute of Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago: The Essential Guide, selected by James N. Wood and Teri J. Edelstein, entries written and compiled by Sally Ruth May (Art Institute of Chicago, 1993), p. 157 (ill.).

Sent by Durand-Ruel, Paris, to Durand-Ruel, New York, 1922. [This transaction is recorded in the Durand-Ruel, New York, stock book for 1904–24 (no. 8124, as Sur la terrasse): “Envoyé par Durand-Ruel Paris chez Durand-Ruel NY (dépôt 8124) en 1922,” as confirmed by Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel, Durand-Ruel Archives, to the Art Institute of Chicago, Oct. 5, 2010, curatorial object file, Art Institute of Chicago. In the same letter, the Durand-Ruel Archives explain that the deposit number (no. 8124) is also recorded in the Durand-Ruel, Paris, deposit book for 1902–04. This corrects information previously published in Colin B. Bailey, with the assistance of John B. Collins, Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age, exh. cat. (National Gallery of Canada/Yale University Press, 1997), p. 308, and Guy-Patrice Dauberville and Michel Dauberville, with the collaboration of Camille Frémontier-Murphy, Renoir: Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, vol. 1, 1858–1881 (Bernheim-Jeune, 2007), p. 300. Bailey identified this painting as possibly cat. 2 (Les deux soeurs, belonging to M. Ch.[arles] Ephrussi) in the Exposition des oeuvres de P.-A. Renoir, Apr. 1–25, 1883 (Durand-Ruel, Paris, Catalogue de l’exposition des oeuvres de P.-A. Renoir, exh. cat. [Pillet & Dumoulin, 1883], p. 9, cat. 2). After including the possible ownership of the painting by Charles Ephrussi in 1883, Bailey says the painting was back with the Durand-Ruel family by 1892 and that it was purchased from Joseph Durand-Ruel by Mrs. Lewis Larned (Annie Swan) Coburn, Chicago. According to the Durand-Ruel Archives, the Art Institute painting was not cat. 2 in the 1883 exhibition but rather cat. 30 (Femme sur une terrasse (Chatou), no owner listed), so Ephrussi would not be in the ownership history of the painting. See Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel, Durand-Ruel Archives, to the Art Institute of Chicago, Oct. 5, 2010, curatorial object file, Art Institute of Chicago.]